Here we go again...

I was a Sonic kid.  Unlike my friends, I never went Super with my Nintendo, I begged my parents for a Genesis instead.  A couple years and a hundred mowed lawns later, I purchased a Saturn due to the impending hype of its first killer-app, Sonic Xtreme.  While a true 32-bit Sonic would never materialize, in its place Yuji Naka and Takashi Iizuka would deliver NiGHTS: Into Dreams..., a game promising to capture the essence of flight.  Hooked by the Christmas NiGHTS demo I got from Blockbuster, NiGHTS (which from here on out will mostly be typed without the asinine capitalization) would go on to consume more of my time than anything else I played that year.  I got A's on every level, 2.0'd every boss, and fiddled with my A-Life for a ridiculous amount of time.  It clicked with me on some intangible level, and even today I'm at a loss for words when I try to describe what made flying around as a purple jester so exhilarating.